1. Field of Invention
This invention is directed to systems, methods and graphical user interfaces that enable object optimized printing of different types of image objects.
2. Background of the Invention
As color printers, including color ink jet printers, color laser printers and digital color copiers and the like, have become more sophisticated, users of such color printers have required more sophisticated rendering of the various portions of mixed content images. Such mixed content images can include text portions, graphics portions and photograph portions.
Prior to the advent of high quality computer generated page images, page images, such as those found in newspapers, newsletters, magazines and the like, were formed by graphic artists composing the page images by hand. Thus, in such hand-composed page images, each different type of object on a page image such as text, photographs, constant color areas or graphs such as pie charts, and sampled or continuously changing images such as sweeps, was optimally formed independently of any other type of object.
Because these page images were composed by hand, each type of object was inherently treated independently of the other objects. Thus, for example, the optimal halftone screen design for photographs, which differs from the optimal halftone screen designs for constant color areas and text, could be selected and the selected screen arranged to an optimal angle.
Initially, color printers, such as color ink jet printers, rendered each document with a unitary set of rendering techniques. Thus, a single halftone screen was applied to each of the different types of image areas in a page, including the text areas, the photographic areas, the sampled image areas and the constant color areas, regardless of whether that halftone screen was appropriate for that image area. This was true for any other rendering parameter, such as the color settings, the gamut settings, the type of compression used, and the like.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,687,303 to Motamed et, al, incorporated herein by reference in its entirety, discloses systems and methods for treating each object of an electronic document independently of the other objects. Thus, the appropriate rendering parameter options could be selected for each different type of object and applied to each different type of object independently of the parameters selected for the other types of objects. U.S. Pat. No. 5,579,446 to Naik et al. and U.S. Pat. No. 5,704,021 to Smith et al. disclose various graphical user interfaces that allow different color control options and different halftoning techniques to be independently applied to text objects, graphics objects and photo objects. In particular, in the 446 and 021 disclosure, the user has the option of manually selecting the rendering options or allowing the system to apply default rendering options to each different type of object.
However, the systems and graphical user interfaces disclosed in the 446 and 021 patents set the rendering parameter options independently of a particular document. Thus, if the user wishes to have a particular set of rendering parameter options applied to a particular document, before printing that document, the user must go to the manual color options graphical user interface of the 446 and 021 patents and select the desired rendering parameter options. The user can then print that document, and any following documents, using the selected set of rendering parameter options.
Then, if the user wishes to print a document using a different set of rendering parameter options, the user must once again open the manual color options graphical user interface and change the selected rendering parameter options before printing the new document. Moreover, if the user wishes to print the previous document or another document requiring the previously selected set of rendering parameter options, the user must once again open the manual color option graphical user interface and change the selected rendering parameter options back to the previously selected set of rendering parameter options.
The graphical user interface shown in the 446 and 021 patent provides only two different rendering parameters, and only three different options for each different rendering parameter, for only three different types of object. However, printers and printer drivers have become more sophisticated, such that an increased number of rendering parameters, an increased number of options within each parameter, and an increased number of different types of objects have been enabled. Accordingly, setting up the particular desired set of rendering parameter options for a particular document has become increasingly cumbersome.
Thus, if the user has a number of different documents requiring different sets of rendering parameter options, the user must either carefully plan when to print those documents requiring the same or similar color options to minimize the number of times the rendering parameter options are changed. Alternatively, the user must continually access the manual color options graphical user interface to change the selected rendering parameter options to those appropriate for the current document. For sophisticated users having large print jobs, this is inefficient and frustrating.
Accordingly, this invention provides systems and methods that allow sets of selected rendering options to be associated with different virtual printers.
By allowing different sets of selected rendering options to be associated with a virtual printer, the user needs to select and set up the virtual printer only once. Then, to change the rendering options to be used to render a particular document and/or to render particular types of objects, the user merely needs to select the appropriate virtual printer or printers.
This invention separately provides systems, methods and graphical user interfaces that permit a user to define a virtual printer having a selected set of rendering options and to store that virtual printer for current or later use.
This invention separately provides systems, methods and graphical user interfaces that allow a user to select a particular virtual printer to be used to control the printing of a document on a physical printer.
These and other features and advantages of this invention are described in or are apparent from the following detailed description of various exemplary embodiments of the systems and methods according to this invention.